Storytelling is absolutely a skill and sometimes we start of with a good basis and then we waste our potential. This generally comes from telling rather than showing in a story. It’s more fulfilling for the viewer or reader to connect the dots themselves and then have their beliefs confirmed or denied by the evidence they find.
So today we’re going to be comparing some good storytelling compared to some poorer storytelling that I have encountered recently. This is particularly in creating a horror theme without losing the audience.
I recently downloaded the original Bioshock. I’ve heard good things about the series, that’s it’s very niche, and that it has horror themes. I’ve also heard that the first one is not all that good.
So I started it, willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s not cutting edge by any means in game play. I actually feel the dated game play more than other games I’ve played. It features a lot of late 90s early 2000s styles of gameplay.
But I’m getting ahead of my self. The game started of in an interesting manner. A plane crashes you survive, and manage to swim to a weird lighthouse. The horror themes were strong. Poor lighting, strange noises, and even a shadowy that was pretty alarming.
However somewhere between poor lighting and the monster, we have this little intro speech to the underwater world we now find ourselves in. It heavily points to government and the church being the ones holding back scientific advancements. Now if they had phrased it as those institutions holding back mankind’s advancements and science’s advancements it would have been an amazing start to the game.
They didn’t do that. The imagery was blatant in some regards and their choice of words were extremely poor. “Where scientists can experiment without morals” or a similar phrasing was how they introduced this wondrous city. The speech was so over the top that it told you “This person is the evil scientist you’ve been warned of.” That single piece of dialogue destroyed any connection we could have made with the individual.
But why is this bad? It’s bad because the best villains aren’t terrifying because of what they do. They’re terrifying because we can see why they have chosen this course of action. It makes sense that they’re doing it and we recoil from it because their motivation might be the same as our own, only with a different method.
But the vast chasm created by telling you who the villain is cannot be bridged by anything after it has been shoved in the player’s face. It’s much better to introduce characters as seemingly blank slates that reveal their intentions with time. That way you slowly start to pickup on things here and there. This creates an unease as your concern grows as the characters become more and more alien to you. Their true selves begin to be revealed as you progress.
The next thing that shattered the horror theme was the sheer pace of the game. I’ve played a number of atmospheric horror games and they were more unnerving than this one. The was nothing but speeding around from objective to objective, there wasn’t much need to explore and the enemies just kept coming.
For me what helps add to horror is the surprise of it. The unknown is the greatest creator of fear. Not knowing what’s waiting for you or what the next corner might hold puts you on edge. The Stalker series and even Subterrain do a much better job of putting the player on edge while creating a horror ambiance.
They do this by controlling light and adding additional concerns. In the beginning, Bioshock controlled the lighting pretty well. But then it evened out to quickly. I played maybe two hours and I felt I had progressed way to far in the game for the amount of time I had spent.
Comparatively, I sank about six hours into my third play through of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and I just barely got into what could be considered the mid game. The pacing is such as that I could play through the campaign in a matter of hours, but the world is such that I need to explore it.
Subterrain is similar in that you’re fighting the environment in addition to fighting your enemies. You have to worry about your own needs in addition to what ever is in the dark. You have to maintain your temperature regulators, your oxygen, your hydration, your food intake, and the power packs that power your lights and weapons. This adds a large amount of stress because you have to keep an eye on a lot of things at once. Focus too much on one and you might not make it back to your base.
Bioshock had none of this. There was scarcity of ammunition, but that was it. The dark was only moderately worrying and the crazed people of the city were a problem. But there was no reason at all behind a lot of it. The best way I can describe it would be to drop someone in the middle of the LA riots without them know, hand them a gun, and then contact them via radio every so often. The player has no idea what’s going on, only that the whole world they see is going to hell in a hand basket, but there’s explanation from anyone.
Even in the most terrifying circumstances, information still flows. People have some understanding of what’s happening. In this scenario I feel like the old internet meme “I do not know who I am. All I know is that I must kill.” maybe I wasn’t paying attention enough, maybe the plot is more nuanced than my attention span can handle.
However a good story will draw you in. It’s like marketing to an extent. You have to get the audience’s attention whether it’s film, games, or writing. If your scenes are too “blah” or boring the audience will lose their focus. And that’s what storytelling is, control of people’s focus while sharing information, real or fictional.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
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